The past couple weeks have been super trying here on the farm. A lot of problem-solving, reminiscing, and thinking ahead to the future. We started the farm almost 3 years ago, with a couple chickens and a milk cow, and a really big passion for where our food comes from and a stick-it-to-the-man attitude about how our food system is currently set up. We have been humbled, to say the least. Raising chickens, creating a business out of the farm, and also raising a family ourselves has been an absolute whirlwind. Between predators getting to our chickens every night, being out of water for almost a week, watching my husband get absolutely worked from hauling water buckets and building farm infrastructure from scratch day in and day out, and being 7 months pregnant in the Texas summer heat with a 10-month-old on my hip while filming my husband talk about raising animals the RIGHT way, I started to wonder if this is all worth it. I mean, I could drive to the store and pick up a chicken breast pretty damn easy. But Wick says it all the time—we didn’t pray for easy, haha.
With all the hard in front of us, we also see a lot of light at the end. It seems like every week we are reminded why we are doing this—a new headline about parasitic disease in our food, a salmonella recall from a restaurant, the fact that conventionally produced chicken in America is dunked in a chlorine bath during processing and that chickens live their lives on top of other dead chickens in huge buildings with no access to the outdoors, and, oh, how products that say they don’t have seed oils in them actually really do have seed oils. It doesn’t end. The way animals are raised is demoralizing, and the way we are marketed to as consumers is just offensive.
What we are doing out here every day is quite the endeavor, don’t get us wrong. We caught the bug of how horrible our food system is a while ago, and it’s super easy to become complacent. But we refuse. Thanks for sticking with us. We can’t wait to get you our eggs again this fall, and we have plenty of chicken if you’d like some. And no, we don’t dip them in chlorine.
